Cathryn Wright While my experience in the corporate world was very different I had three attempted from the voluntary sector, the skills in business management careers before I came to that I developed are crucial to my role. Stonewall has a strong Stonewall five years ago. I infrastructure, and I’m proud to be the current custodian of its started out in science successful model of growth. academia, then trained to be a wine buyer, and Stonewall is unique. We have developed a diverse portfolio of finally qualified as an income streams and activity - which is vital to voluntary sector accountant working for a organisations. Without this, the work we do and independence range of commercial we enjoy would be vulnerable in such a challenging external organisations in financial market. and operational management. But more Business tactics help us to be sustainable, but we also add in a and more I saw the strategic layer. Everyone we work with – from corporates to impact of LGBT individuals – goes on a journey. They become not only discrimination in the sponsors of LGBT equality, but active and passionate advocates. workplace and beyond, Watching that transformation in someone, or in an organisation, and felt drawn to make a is one of the things I love most about my job shift to work that aligned more closely with my values. My current role with Stonewall has afforded me the privilege of working for an organisation whose mission and output I care about on a personal level. It has allowed me to understand the issues that LGBT people face in a more thoughtful way, one that made me appreciate the depth and complexity of true equality. The personal journey I’ve been on has been as powerful and important as the skills and knowledge I’ve developed working alongside the incredible Stonewall team. I love working in an environment where my day to day work contributes to a world where everyone is accepted without exception. ‘P’ could not marry or adopt, and could be sent to the wrong sex prison, and raped there, if we couldn’t pay parking fines. All records of Forbes were removed, so there was no way of challenging it, and when trans activists took cases to the European Court of Human Rights they were beasted by the media. My case was the first piece of case law to come into existence, anywhere in the world, that prevented discrimination because someone is trans. It was about the right to work – really, the right to live – and we also won the right for anonymity so fellow trans activists could seek legal help without fear of abuse. Twenty years later, although being trans is not a mental illness, we are still forced, without consent, into a degrading psychiatric regime, where we are refused essential treatment, P was the applicant in P vs S and Cornwall County Council, coerced into sterilisation, and humiliated literally for years. We European Court of Justice, 1 May 1996. are then segregated by keeping our names on a central register, and giving us a Gender Identity Certificate that identifies us as Before the Forbes case trans people were equal. We had our trans. birth certificates corrected and lived our lives like everyone else. But Ewan Forbes was a trans man who inherited a baronetcy that For fifty years we seem to have been subject to a eugenic only passed down the male line. It seems to have generated a project to protect male aristocratic inheritance. So, I must look constitutional crisis: until 2013 the UK monarchy was also away to protect our right to anonymity and must look to the limited by primogeniture, and if Ewan could inherit a baronetcy, future for my equal citizenship. then a trans man could become king, and royal succession would no longer be secure. Ewan was the last trans person to have equality. After Forbes, we weren’t allowed to correct our birth certificates and our civil rights evaporated. Without parliamentary debate or legislation, we were reclassified as mentally ill, had no right to employment, Nina Nasim Nina is a transgender activist Nina runs the men’s Asylum Support Group and the Women’s born in Suffolk. Nina met her Asylum Support Group. She also works helping LGBTI people now husband who is from find solicitors to represent them in their asylum case and Afghanistan whilst she was supports them one on one throughout the process of claiming presenting as male back asylum. Last year 85 of its clients were granted asylum on the when they were 19. They basis of sexuality and gender identity. married the year same sex marriage was legal in 2014. Nina also established UKLGIG’s Trans Asylum Support Group in She came out to him as 2016, the first of its kind in Europe. The group provides a safe transgender one month and inclusive space for trans people fleeing persecution and before the wedding and he seeking refugee protection. Since beginning the group last year, supported her throughout. the group has since seen a rapid increase in people accessing They now live together in the group and 3 trans and non-binary people from the group London. have gone on to be granted asylum. Her relationship sparked her interest in experiences of being LGBTI as a migrant, the importance of intersectionality within the LGBTI community and to be more welcoming of LGBTI people from other countries and cultures. She is now the LGBTI Asylum Seeker Support Worker at UKLGIG. Founded in 1993, UKLGIG is a unique charity which supports in excess of 1,500 lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex people every year many of whom are survivors of human rights abuses. It provides emotional and legal support to LGBTI people fleeing persecution on account of their sexual orientation and gender identity. Crispin Blunt MP Coming out aged 50, after a In 2015 this group became a full All Party Parliamentary Group decade of (APPG) for Global LGBT Rights, chaired by Nick Herbert, whilst I growing started chairing realisation that there wasn’t something the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, monitoring wrong with me the work of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), not that had to be least on advancing human rights globally. suppressed and managed, I Part of that official agenda is promoting LGBT rights, a relatively enjoyed, and still recent western liberal consensus that the APPG helps sustain do, the euphoria that is very far from universal across the world, not least in the of finally being Commonwealth, with the dubious inheritance of British myself. Whilst it Victorian-era sodomy laws and an unforgiving Protestantism in was, and is, many Commonwealth societies. qualified by the responsibility There is a vast amount of work to do to reverse the less towards those disrupted by my unintended path through life, attractive parts of that legacy, and advance what now seem that responsibility has been more easily borne by sharing the obvious universal individual freedoms in today’s Britain. stories of fellow GayDads. That we GayDads have the freedom to come out and share our stories in today’s Britain is down to I’m pleased that Boris Johnson’s FCO accepted the Committee’s the sacrifice of careers, freedom and sometimes the lives of recommendation to reinstate the flying of the Rainbow Flag in previous generations of LGBT rights campaigners in Britain. London and at missions on Pride Day, making visible our commitment to LGBT rights globally. Symbols matter, and if my In 2012 I found myself with the freedom of the back benches. path can encourage and help others to be free, then I hope that So at the invitation of Lance Price, and under the Presidency of gives satisfaction to those who blazed the path for me. Speaker John Bercow, I created the Parliamentary Friends of the Kaleidoscope Trust. Seeing countless LGBT people facing serious violations of their civil, political and economic rights overseas, who follow in the footsteps of the British activists to whom I owe my freedom to be myself, it seemed the least I could do was support them. Stewart McDonald MP For me, it didn’t start out this way. I can remember the crunching nerves in my stomach like it was only yesterday. The first time I joined my community in a gay bar I felt a range of anxieties and excitement. I wasn't sure what to expect. I had watched Queer as Folk and expected it to be something like that - but this was Glasgow, my home city. Could it really be that, well, camp and racy? Since then, I have never looked back. It is fantastic that many of us are out of the closet now - and even better that we may have encouraged and inspired others to come 'out'. No longer do people, including MPs, feel they should live quietly and in shame about being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. The LGBT community is all too aware what it is like to live in silent non-existence. Our spaces, be they bars, clubs or community centres, were once deemed illegal. We've lived I am very proud to be part of the “gayest group in Westminster” underground for too long but equally too much time has passed and one of the most diverse parliaments in history. to go back to those days. It feels great to be at the point of no return. I’ve made some amazing friends over the past couple of years and have had some incredible times as a result. I have met a family of LGBT people who share experiences of how difficult it was to grow up and to be "out" at a very grand place of work - the House of Commons.